As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead

Like many Mac-based creative professionals, I followed this year's WWDC keynote anxiously, awaiting the "one more thing" that never came: an E5 Xeon refresh of the Mac Pro line. Its absence was brutally disappointing; thankfully, Tim Cook broke his vow of secrecy to reassure us that a new Mac Pro will arrive in 2013. But for filmmakers compressing hours of 4K footage or school labs in need of new Maya machines, that’s a long time to wait—perhaps too long. Since I was also in the market for a machine to help out with my V-Ray renders, I decided that the time had come to evaluate my alternatives. The current Westmere-based Mac Pro line is definitely out of sync with what’s available elsewhere, and it is no longer competitive from a price-to-power standpoint.

I have heard it said that Dell, HP, and Apple split the workstation market pretty much three ways; whether or not this is true, it did seem worth taking a look at how the other big boys’ hot-rods rolled. The HP Z820 and Dell Precision T5600 are both monstrous dual-socket Intel E5-2665 Xeons clocked at 2.4GHz and, if I had to guess, I’d say that they are much like what would have replaced the dual Westmere Xeon 2.66GHz Mac Pro that I reviewed in 2010.

Of course, you can still build your own workstation, but I’m writing this for an audience who needs top-tier support and doesn’t want to chase six different companies when something goes wrong. I have my own overclocked 3930K gaming rig dual-booting Linux and Windows, but as I’ve pointed out countless times in the comments section of my Mac Pro reviews, a workstation needs to do one thing: keep working. Vendor support remains key to making this happen.

That’s where the Mac Pro, Dell T5600, and HP Z820 come in. We'll start our cage match with the HP Z820... since it was the first machine to arrive for testing.

Review of the HP Z820

Specs as reviewed:

Dual E5-2665/8 Core/2.4GHz with 20MB cache

Intel® C602 chipset

16GB quad-channel RAM (16 DIMM slots total, 4 used in this config)

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB (1 dual-link DVI, 2 DisplayPort output)

500GB – Windows 7 Professional

Dual-layer DVD-RW

HP keyboard and mouse

Since you can get Linux for these machines instead of Windows 7, I also tested this machine with an HP-provided Redhat Linux boot disk. More on that later.

Standard Ports:

4 USB 2.0 on back, 1 on front

2 USB 3.0 on back, 2 on front

1 Firewire 400 on back, 1 on front

2 Gigabit ethernet on back

1 VGA out

PS/2 keyboard and mouse on back

Stereo output on back

Headphones out on front

Mic input on back and front

Expansion slots:

3 PCIe Gen3 x16

1 PCIe Gen3 x8

1 PCIe Gen3 x4

1 PCIe Gen2 x4

1 PCI

Price as configured: $6,840 with discount active at time of review

HP has a lot of high-end products, and the company is no stranger to content creators. For instance, its 30-bit Dreamcolor monitors are exceptional, and if you bought one of these monitors and hooked it up to a Mac Pro, you’d actually be throwing away color (Apple still hasn’t added support for 10-bits-per-channel color to OS X). My Z820 and Dell T5600 review units came with a Quadro 4000; both Nvidia and AMD restrict high-bit output to their pro line by means of their drivers, so both workstations can take advantage of these high-bit displays.

Unfortunately, I don’t own a 30-bit display, but the Quadro 4000 works fine with my dual NEC 2490WUXi monitors in both Windows 7 and CentOS 6.3.

The price tag

Before I cover the hardware and software features of the Z820, let's talk about that slight sticker shock. The first thing that jumped out at you about the Z820 was probably not its 32-thread CPU or giant cache—it was the price tag of $6,840, sans tax. We don’t tend to think of Mac Pros as "the cheap retail option," but workstation retailers like HP, Dell, and BOXX consistently come in at a higher price than the equivalently specced Mac Pro. This time around, the situation is obviously different, since Apple doesn’t even offer a Xeon E5 machine, but it is typical and there's a good reason for it: on-site support.

The HP Z820 and Dell T5600 both come with three-year on-site warranties, while the Mac Pro has one-year standard AppleCare (you can buy an added two years of AppleCare for $250). The difference is significant. AppleCare through a local Apple store or certified Apple repair outlet works well if you live in a major city and can afford a few days of down time, but an on-site warranty is like having a hotline to a dude ready to run out to your office to fix your problem the next day. It's meant to ensure minimum down time in case something goes wrong, like when a power supply fails.

This level of service adds a lot of risk to the profitability of a machine for workstation vendors. If you live in Cheesehole, Wisconsin—away from an HP- or Dell-certified repair guy—they will still put their dude on a plane to fix your computer, for three years, at no additional cost.

An on-site warranty is a standard in enterprise environments, and Apple says that AppleCare includes on-site coverage... but I’ve never once had them send a technician to my office in 20+ years of using Macs. They always tell you to bring the machine in, and even at large Apple stores, parts aren’t stocked, so there's at least a two-day down time for repairs.

On-site coverage is computer life insurance, and it’s expensive. Given that level of service, the $6,840 price tag of the Z820 is very reasonable; whether the added premium is worth it remains between you and your wallet.

The case

The Z820 was the first of the PC machines to arrive, and it instantly looked and felt like a solid workstation. It’s quite heavy and about the same size as the Mac Pro case, with about half an inch more in the width and two inches less in the height thanks to the front and rear handles being integrated into its 5U rack-mountable profile:

The front sports three optical bays, two USB 3 ports, one USB 2 port, a headphone jack, a mic input, and a Firewire 400 connector. It might seem funny for a new machine to incude such an old Firewire port, but it can come in handy for older DV cameras. (You can have the Dell T5600 configured with a 1394a card as well.)

Despite its heft, the Z820’s exterior is mostly plastic, with two solid metal sides. The plastic is not cheap-feeling and the finishing and tight coupling with the metal make it feel rugged and worth the money. When I look at the design of a workstation, I consider its resale value. When you sit next to a used Mac Pro with a prospective buyer, it’s easy for them to want—it’s beautiful, solid, and air-tight. The Z820 is what I’d imagine a competing case would look like.

Once you crack open the case, the Z820 continues to impress. The four 3.5" drive bays are stacked at the front of the unit, which I found really helpful when doing some swapping and rejigging:

The toolless HD mounting brackets of the Z820 are nice, and have a firm snap-and-lock mechanism for setting them securely in place within the drive bay. As in the Mac Pro, you can have drives resting harmlessly in the bay without being connected. The plastic brackets felt a bit flimsy at first, but they were fine even with a lot of disk swapping. It does seem a little weird that a newer workstation wouldn’t have SSD mounts, but my Icy Dock SSD-to-HDD enclosure fit fine in one of the bays.

Full-size ATX fiends will whine about how four drive bays are too few, but my Corsair 550D and its four optical drive bays (three empty) and six hard drive bays are overkill—and of dubious value considering the 550D is designed for low noise and heat. Video professionals will have external RAID arrays connected to PCI cards or by Thunderbolt, not a bunch of disks inside their machine. The smaller size is more portable and lowers the overall heat of the PCs, so I prefer this approach. But you do need a balance between expandability and size, and the Z820 is right in the sweet spot in my opinion.

The PCI slots are easily accessible and cable management is exceptional. There are no screws for the PCI cards—they get locked in place by a small door that closes when the case is shut. Smart, time-saving features like this are something you will appreciate if you’re upgrading a lab of these. Once you take off the PCI and mainboard compartment doors, all the RAM is easily accessible:

The Z820 has 16 DIMM slots, twice that of the current Mac Pro, so presumably you could upgrade it to 128GB with 8GB chips vs. 64GB total for the Mac Pro (which would be a bad idea anyway, because the Mac Pro uses triple-channel memory). But honestly, I don’t see this as a huge advantage. I do 3D for print (high res 32-bits-per-channel images) and run virtual machines and almost never page out with just 24GB. Nevertheless, if you need a ridiculous amount of RAM, the Z820 will accommodate it.

The power supply is modular and easily pulled out by a similar handle and snap-bracket that the hard drives have. This is clearly a machine that's well-engineered from head to toe.

264 Reader Comments

I really prefer the AMD cards over the Nvidia cards for Linux performance at the workstation level (give me a GeForce for Windows gaming any day, though!). The v7900 is slightly cheaper than the Quadro 4k, it's got better benchmarks and the Linux drivers are superior.

The flip-side, of course, is that Apple appears less and less interested in supporting such workflows these days - e.g. look at the disruption they caused when they retooled FCP to make it more 'prosumer' friendly. And traditional, professional-oriented features such as ColorSync, AppleScript/Automator, etc. are either now commoditized enough to be available on other platforms (e.g. Windows and Linux also provide some form of colour management now) or are being largely neglected and left to fade away (AS/Automator). If a technology isn't on iOS, it just isn't a first-class Apple citizen any more.

I agree that Apple is moving their own applications to the consumer space but they aren't showing any signs of neglecting professional frameworks, other than the 30-bit colour mentioned already. Actually, they have tried to implement it apparently, but it opened up a can of worms that they will have to revisit soon since it's needed, but other technologies are fine and not neglected. AppleScript is complicated by their sandboxing technology but .

There is no Automator for Windows or Linux. Trust me - I've looked. Automator isn't just a GUI to a .bat/.sh file, so anything that says it's Automator for other OSes is stretching the truth.

gmerrick - thx for the info.

Quote:

But my major issue with the line was that it made it seem as if one needed to get a whole new machine just to run a *nix if one wanted to dabble in shell scripts. The only desktop *nix that has that criteria at present is OSX, any other can be installed alongside a different OS, booted from removable media into a in ram desktop or installed into a VM

sure. I am writing this for Mac users, many of whom are new to Unix and assume that Linux is "more" Unix, so I was just saying that you don't need another Linux box to learn bash and OS X is functionally similar for shell scripting. Maybe it wasn't clear.

I really prefer the AMD cards over the Nvidia cards for Linux performance at the workstation level (give me a GeForce for Windows gaming any day, though!). The v7900 is slightly cheaper than the Quadro 4k, it's got better benchmarks and the Linux drivers are superior.

I agree – I hate rewarding companies by paying more just for support. I got tired of swapping out my Radeon 7950 from my gaming machine that also runs CentOS and just started using the Radeon in Linux with pro apps, barnacles and all. But the Radeon needs extra work that the Quadro (and possibly the FirePro) don't to work with 3D apps in Linux. I had to manually hack in a GL 2 preference so that Houdini would launch and I can't use viewport 2 in Maya.

I am surprised that you did not evaluate a workstation from the soon to be number one PC vendor. Lenovo. They have very compelling options that are more configurable than what HP and especially Dell offers. The Lenovo Thinkstation D30 for example can run 2 E5-260 processors, up to 256GB of ECC ram, Quadro 5000 or Dual FX5000 in SLI,, 5 SATA SSD drive up to 600GB each, USB 3.0, multiple displays plus you get Lenovo reliability.

Linux does have some 3D software that's not available on OS X, but it's generally very specialized – like Massive (a $15,000 crowd simulation package) or Mari (a $2000 texture painting app). With the exception of Softimage, OS X has more 3D apps in the consumer/prosumer space – modo, ZBrush, etc. Max will come to OS X before it will ever come to Linux for that reason but I hate Max so it can die in a fire for all I care. I agree that 3D is dominated completely by Windows but I have workflows that are so heavily asset-oriented that OS X even makes more sense for 3D for me because OS X is really a digital asset management dream (Spotlight, metadata searches for textures, Automator for generating previews of Maya scenes, etc). The software itself runs the same – Maya used to suck on OS X when it was first ported but it's the same as running it on Windows or Linux now – it's just that the OpenGL is a bit slower.

Yeah, Linux has more high-end stuff, but a lot of it is in-house software written for a particular pipeline companies pipeline. OS X does have the packages you mentioned, but it's more hassle to run those on OS X, then have to jump onto Windows/Linux to get the scenes/objects, etc. into Softimage, etc.

I've never been a big fan of Max, but have used it a lot when working at a gaming company, it does the job. The other biggie in games companies is Motion Builder. With OS X, it's really hard/annoying to build a workflow that can utilises those apps, and then to plug them into your own pipeline via scripts and in-house applications.

Like yourself, you can certainly have an OS X only setup, in which the available 3D packages can cover a lot of needs. For me, it's the hassle of knowing that I don't have certain packages at my disposal, on top of the other issue –the high-end hardware that Apple seems to want to push aside.

QFT. Some of these content industries are also *extremely* time- and quality-sensitive. Miss some deadlines or ship faulty work, and you'll be up to your ears in penalty clauses and lawsuits, losing not just clients but your entire business too. This is why stable, reliable, future-proofed workflows are vastly more important than fiddling about with the latest greatest hardware devices - something folks who've never worked in such industries may fail to appreciate.

Good point. I think we reached a point over a decade ago when the hardware was solid enough to provide a stable workflow; whether that was Windows/Linux or Mac, they will perform roughly the same over time.

I find Software is the point of contention, with applications crashing, or just failing at the wrong moment, etc. but that's kinda expected when the advances we see being pushed into them is churned out at an amazing rate. As to workflows, thank the stars for Python!

Like yourself, you can certainly have an OS X only setup, in which the available 3D packages can cover a lot of needs. For me, it's the hassle of knowing that I don't have certain packages at my disposal, on top of the other issue –the high-end hardware that Apple seems to want to push aside.

I use Parallels Desktop for any apps that I really have to use in Windows, like when I need to export an FBX or something from a Max stock model. It works perfectly in DX or OpenGL modes, but obviously that's of limited use for extended work.

I really prefer the AMD cards over the Nvidia cards for Linux performance at the workstation level (give me a GeForce for Windows gaming any day, though!). The v7900 is slightly cheaper than the Quadro 4k, it's got better benchmarks and the Linux drivers are superior.

I agree – I hate rewarding companies by paying more just for support. I got tired of swapping out my Radeon 7950 from my gaming machine that also runs CentOS and just started using the Radeon in Linux with pro apps, barnacles and all. But the Radeon needs extra work that the Quadro (and possibly the FirePro) don't to work with 3D apps in Linux. I had to manually hack in a GL 2 preference so that Houdini would launch and I can't use viewport 2 in Maya.

Yeah, the v7900 is part of the FirePro line and I've not had reports of either of those problems. I'm not a GFX professional though - just a dabbler who geeks out over hardware. I don't even own a workstation. I build custom rigs as a hobby for friends and acquaintances and I've built a few workstations for GFX guys on comparatively tight budgets.

All of them were built to dual boot Win7 and Fedora and I know the users prefer Linux whenever possible. I also build them with 2x quad Xeons instead of a single 8-core because that can save you a big chunk of money for a minimal performance hit.

I understand the reasoning behind wanting big-name machines for extra support and warranty type deals, but man you can save a lot of money if you build yourself - I can build 3 similarly powerful rigs for the cost of the Dell listed in this review, even after taking a little overhead for my time.

Great article, David. It gives me some options to consider if I decide to get more serious about 3D.

As a long-time 3D dabbler, I'm interested in knowing your reasons for preferring Maya for high-resolution print work. You made your dislike for 3ds Max (the software I currently use) clear in the comments, but why Maya as opposed to something like Cinema 4D or modo? I've always felt that Maya's appeal lay in its animation features and customizability. It's certainly not the first package I would think of for print/illustration.

I understand the reasoning behind wanting big-name machines for extra support and warranty type deals, but man you can save a lot of money if you build yourself - I can build 3 similarly powerful rigs for the cost of the Dell listed in this review, even after taking a little overhead for my time.

I really doubt that. The CPU in both systems in is an E5-2665 that sells for about 1400 dollars so 6 of those by itself would run more than the dell machine.

"An on-site warranty is a standard in enterprise environments, and Apple says that AppleCare includes on-site coverage... but I’ve never once had them send a technician to my office in 20+ years of using Macs"

You cannot have been using macs for 20+ years. The first mac came out in 1985.

"An on-site warranty is a standard in enterprise environments, and Apple says that AppleCare includes on-site coverage... but I’ve never once had them send a technician to my office in 20+ years of using Macs"

You cannot have been using macs for 20+ years. The first mac came out in 1985.

That was 27 years ago. This is 2012. Last I checked, 27 is higher than 20.

Aaron - I asked Dell to configure a system to match the HP Z820 for price/performance and that was meant to appeal to a Mac Pro user. This is what they sent. Adding $700 would just make it that much less appealing to a Mac Pro user and I doubt it would address my issues with build quality.

I agree with Aaron on this one. Typical users don't deal with PR, because PR isn't tech. One can argue that PR should consult who they need to consult, but ultimately it's not the best match. As an aside: Sales can refer you to a tech person if you ask when you call Dell (almost every manufacturer that I've dealt with can and does do this.) Should Dell's PR know what workstation to send to a review? Absolutely, yes. I know you say that's "how things are done" for reviews, that's not how things are done for us normals.

Quote:

I had no experience with either an HP or a Dell workstation before this.

If you're doing hardware reviews, I think you need to be VERY familiar with the hardware. For me, statements like this cast doubt on the entire process.

"An on-site warranty is a standard in enterprise environments, and Apple says that AppleCare includes on-site coverage... but I’ve never once had them send a technician to my office in 20+ years of using Macs"

You cannot have been using macs for 20+ years. The first mac came out in 1985.

Apple educates and certifies Apple Authorized Service Providers to give Onsite support, so Apple themselves will seldom or never send anyone as far as I can tell.

I agree that Apple is moving their own applications to the consumer space but they aren't showing any signs of neglecting professional frameworks, other than the 30-bit colour mentioned already. Actually, they have tried to implement it apparently, but it opened up a can of worms that they will have to revisit soon since it's needed, but other technologies are fine and not neglected. AppleScript is complicated by their sandboxing technology but .

<hot-button alert>

Believe me, AppleScript is stagnant and has no measurable support within Apple these days. And I'm not the only long-time AS expert who is deeply pessimistic of its long-term health either (I give it 5-10 years myself).

Regarding the sandboxing issue, 10.8 does (finally!) add an NSUserAppleScriptTask class that allows scripts to execute outside of the sandbox. In theory, this ought to eliminate the entire sandboxing issue. In practice, it provides the absolute bare minimum functionality and no more: it's a single-shot affair so you can't send the script more than one Apple event (as you could with NSAppleScript), nor preserve state changes between runs (as Script Editor applets can). So it's only suitable for simple tasks and not at all efficient in repeated use.

Meantime, ComponentManager is deprecated in 10.8, which means OSA's language plugin architecture will be abandoned, and XPC Services is clearly evolving into an iOS- and app developer-friendly Distributed Objects-style (ugh!) successor to the Apple Event Manager. The whole platform's being nickel-n-dimed to death by Apple decision makers who don't understand it and don't care to. Very depressing to watch so much untapped potential going silently to waste.

As for Automator, there's very little activity on Apple's part as far as development, support or promotion goes. Check the automator-dev and automator-users mailing lists, for example; they're an absolute ghost town. If it has one saving grace, it's that it's a ground-up Cocoa technology so shouldn't earn the same hostility from Apple and 3rd-party Cocoa devs as AS, but it's undervalued and greatly underexploited - it should be directly embedded in the GUI of every application that does any sort of notifications (Finder for folder actions, Mail for mail rules, iCal for alarms, etc), but most Mac users never even see it, never mind think it's something that might be useful to themselves. And, of course, it really should be on iOS too if it's to survive and thrive in the long run (e.g. imagine it tied into the notification center there). But I think Apple are interested nowadays with delivering a much more canned (and profitable) user experience, rather than letting users create their own.

Quote:

There is no Automator for Windows or Linux. Trust me - I've looked. Automator isn't just a GUI to a .bat/.sh file, so anything that says it's Automator for other OSes is stretching the truth.

[/quote][/quote]

I think PowerShell is closest on Windows, but that's obviously geared to more technical users who have the time and interest to learn some basic coding skills. The nice thing about Automator is that while it's far less granular/flexible, this is not necessarily a disadvantage as it also means it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Assuming a user can find an action that fits their needs, they can very quickly reap the benefits for next-to-no effort - and they still have the option of learning more traditional scripting if they need to go deeper later on.

I agree Linux is light-years behind on any sort of coherent integration, of course, but that's a rant for another time.

(I'm a huge believer that professional content creators should learn basic automation skills, BTW. While it requires some time and work, it can reward them hugely in the long run. But I do bemoan the sorry state of the tools available to them - not to mention the bad attitude they get from some 'real' programmers who seem more interested in protecting their turf than expanding its benefits to all.)

[Edited to add: this is getting OT so if anyone wants to discuss we should probably take it to MacAch or Battlefront.]

You cannot have been using macs for 20+ years. The first mac came out in 1985.

it's 2012 (that's 27 when you subtract 1985).

Quote:

As a long-time 3D dabbler, I'm interested in knowing your reasons for preferring Maya for high-resolution print work. You made your dislike for 3ds Max (the software I currently use) clear in the comments, but why Maya as opposed to something like Cinema 4D or modo? I've always felt that Maya's appeal lay in its animation features and customizability. It's certainly not the first package I would think of for print/illustration.

ya, I got into Maya early on (around version 3.5) because it was a more complete package than what I was using at the time (form-Z) and I liked Paint Effects. That was on an Athlon in Win2k and I was using pirate software to learn and I guess the big-name appeal of Maya is what drew me in. If I was starting out now, I'd probably use modo for hard surface and cage modelling but I'm just way too fast in Maya to switch now, despite modo's better toolset. I also find modo's viewport kind of slow in general, regardless of platform. It just feels heavier than Maya.

But I never liked Cinema 4D - it always felt too limited. It's great for animated logos, but its renderer sucked pretty badly until relatively recently (R11 or so). As I learned Maya, I wanted to get into effects, complex shaders and all the out-of-the-box goodies you get in a nodal approach like Maya, Softimage's ICE or Houdini. And then there's the customizability – I write a lot of MEL scripts to make my workflow easier ( http://www.creativecrash.com/users/dave ... _downloads ) so I knew I could grow into Maya (and eventually bought into a subscription). My next stage is learning Houdini because it's just an insane app for procedural effects, particles and dynamics so it can save money otherwise spent on plug-ins for Maya. The price just came down to $4500, which is great for such an immensely powerful app. But that will mostly be used to complement Maya.

Miss some deadlines or ship faulty work, and you'll be up to your ears in penalty clauses and lawsuits, losing not just clients but your entire business too. This is why stable, reliable, future-proofed workflows are vastly more important [...]

I find Software is the point of contention, with applications crashing, or just failing at the wrong moment, etc. but that's kinda expected when the advances we see being pushed into them is churned out at an amazing rate. As to workflows, thank the stars for Python!

I'm not just talking about automated workflows - manual workflows are at least as critical, often moreso. Many places will use a combination of both: lots of elbow grease on the shop floor, plus various automation servers in the backroom. Deploying changes to any manual or automated systems, or the points where they meet, is always a nervous time.

This isn't really all that surprising. High-end workstations are, in my opinion, a dying market segment. Basically, these machines are (and have been for years) heavily I/O bound. When dealing with massive files (tens to hundreds of GB,) you can only run the machine as fast as the disks allow. Simply put, disk I/O rates have not kept pace with the exponential increases in CPU power, especially with multithreaded operations. Ethernet is in basically the same situation; a workstation from 5 years ago could easily saturate gigE in most of these workloads.

Yes, there are ways to configure disks such that they can keep up... but those are not workstation-class configurations, those are datacenter-class configurations (think large infiniband or fiber channel arrays slotted with fast SSDs.) When you're spending $75k on a disk array, you might as well just buy a 16 core ProLiant and slot in a few datacenter-class GPGPU cards.

On the low end of this market, any IT shop can spec out a lower-end HP or Dell with a top-end core i7, a couple SSDs and a decent gaming card for less than half of what these machines cost. No, it won't be competitive with the machines here, but sporadic, heavy compute loads like this are rapidly moving to the cloud anyway, and Amazon does rent GPU compute instances.

This is part of the reason Apple has basically given up here: the workloads make way too much sense to put in the cloud, and the high-end workstation market segment is shrinking as general-purpose PCs are becoming more capable of performing the workloads that used to be the exclusive domain of monster workstations. On the high end, these things are basically already servers in a desktop case; so price them too high and you're competing with servers like the ProLiant (which basically follow commodities pricing patterns, so margins are slim.) With the way that HP does channel sales, it doesn't matter if it's a preconfig or not; your reseller will likely assemble it for you anyway.

I would not be at all surprised to see Apple let the Mac Pro slowly fade into obscurity the way the Xserve did. For 90% of the people who use a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro or iMac with a fast Thunderbolt array will likely serve their needs. For the other 10%, well, sorry; you're not worth Apple's time to chase a shrinking niche market being squeezed from two sides. With the performance pressure from below and price pressure from above, this market probably won't exist in 5 years.

I agree with Aaron on this one. Typical users don't deal with PR, because PR isn't tech. One can argue that PR should consult who they need to consult, but ultimately it's not the best match.

PR is PR and really they have no idea either way, so they consult with the lab to send the proper system. Dell's lab worked with PR to configure this system based on my requests. Dell's request that I review the system's Quadro driver as-is was done through PR but it was after consulting the lab guys.

Quote:

If you're doing hardware reviews, I think you need to be VERY familiar with the hardware. For me, statements like this cast doubt on the entire process.

This has no bearing on anything I've actually said. If you take issue with a point I've made, spell it out. Insinuating that I don't know what I'm talking about because I haven't used a workstation with a particular logo is pretty lame. I learned Maya on Windows PCs and I have been using workstation-class machines for around 17 years.

Maintenance and troubleshooting are beyond the abilities of the average user. Want to install Maya on Fedora? Get your trenchcoat on, because first you’re going to hack your X-Windows conf to blacklist the default nouveau driver, then once you’ve killed the Xserver and installed the Nvidia driver, you need to log in as root to enable dual screen spanning (yes, really).

While Linux is my OS of choice, I'll certainly admit it's not suitable for everyone and less than user friendly at times. And I haven't ever used RHEL and CentOS, but the NVidia binary blob is the same everywhere I reckon. So, once you've installed the driver, did you try running "nvidia-settings"? It should be included with the driver package, or something like "nvidia-utils" depending on your distribution. At least I'm able to use it to switch display configurations on the fly, as a non-root user as well.

What OS are you running? In Ubuntu and RHEL, accessing nvidia-settings requires admin privledges because xorg.conf is located in /etc/xorg and any changes in /etc/ requires root access.

Arch, but yes, xorg.conf is located under /etc as well. The thing is, I don't have to overwrite it in order to change metamodes, it works immediately. If you wish to write to xorg.conf, you need root; but the other option is to write the nvidia-settings config file somewhere, and then put "nvidia-settings -l /PATH/TO/CONFIG/FILE" somewhere within your X/DE startup scripts.

If you're doing hardware reviews, I think you need to be VERY familiar with the hardware. For me, statements like this cast doubt on the entire process.

I respectfully disagree - this was clearly a review of the options available to someone who is usually a Mac Pro user who might want some extra grunt from alternative sources. Anyone more comfortable with these sorts of boxes would hardly need this sort of comparison.

ut for filmmakers compressing hours of 4K footage or school labs in need of new Maya machines,

LOL - you must not use Maya that much - it will run just fine on the current spec offering by Apple's towers.

As for the 4k film editing - this is a new and untapped fringe area of film-making. The mainstream standard is not diving into it just yet.

Also - the cost of switching platforms goes beyond simply buying a box with a different label on it (Apple to HP). You also have to buy new software licenses for any and all software used. And any extra hardware costs for making final output seamless with the workstation. 3D or Video Editing - Compositing - Rendering - etc.

It's like buying a new set of tires for a car only to toss the existing car for a brand new one just for some new tires.

As far as support goes - I've never had issue with Apple. They tend to ship parts out before I can get the old / broken ones in the mail. The main isue I have with Apple is that their CSRs lack specialized knowledge. IF there are 2 similar parts (say a power adaptor) they get easily confused as to which adaptor works with which device.

Dell - I wouldn't buy from to save my grandmother's life as their after-sale support sucks like a blackhole. Too many bad experiences over too many years with them.

HP - their customer service is good - but I also know folks that work for HP and can bypass the typical consumer routes for service. But even with that as HP has gotten larger as a company - even internal connections have begun having issues dealing with repairs or replacements as the company has begun treating it's remote employees in the same manner as consumers. They're slipping.

Re. the USB 3.0 driver issues: Windows 7 does not have native driver support for USB 3.0, and so support, performance and stability are dependent on the hardware provider. It's unforgivable that HP has not made sure this is rock-solid for a machine at this price point and for this intended audience. (Ironically, HP's lapse lends unintended support to the Apple model of a single provider for both HW and SW.)

This issue should disappear for Windows 8, as Microsoft has built its own native driver stack for USB 3.0. There have also been significant improvements to the graphics rendering pipeline in Windows 8, so it might be interesting to revisit this subject in 6 months or so to see if any of this helps pro workstation users.

I would not be at all surprised to see Apple let the Mac Pro slowly fade into obscurity the way the Xserve did. For 90% of the people who use a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro or iMac with a fast Thunderbolt array will likely serve their needs. For the other 10%, well, sorry; you're not worth Apple's time to chase a shrinking niche market being squeezed from two sides. With the performance pressure from below and price pressure from above, this market probably won't exist in 5 years.

I don't really want to get into this since it's such flame bait but I think that the Apple of Tim Cook is a bit different than the Apple of Steve Jobs (the advertising is worse!). I think Jobs would have had let the creative market die because it was "old" but Tim Cook probably knows that you can't just kill your long-time creative user market without some serious consequences. XServe was a failed venture – killing all hardware for video editors would have a domino effect if companies felt that any piece could disappear once it dropped to less-than-iPhone marketshare. Apple has to make a tower. It's that simple.

Thanks for a warmly supportive review of Linux (even more lovely to hear it from a Mac guy), but just a comment on your Linux contras:

"I wanted to take a screenshot while a right-click menu was open, but between the built-in screenshot utility in Gnome and ImageMagick’s, it wasn’t possible. I could only capture the window behind it."

Also - the cost of switching platforms goes beyond simply buying a box with a different label on it (Apple to HP). You also have to buy new software licenses for any and all software used. And any extra hardware costs for making final output seamless with the workstation. 3D or Video Editing - Compositing - Rendering - etc.

LAWL - no you don't. Maya, Mudbox, Nuke, and most others use platform-agnostic licenses that can be transferred between OSes without a problem. I do it all the time. V-Ray uses a dongle that works on all platforms. Houdini and a ton of other software like Octane Render use floating network licenses that are cross-platform. The only apps that use platform-specific licenses are ZBrush and the Adobe apps.

This isn't really all that surprising. High-end workstations are, in my opinion, a dying market segment. Basically, these machines are (and have been for years) heavily I/O bound. When dealing with massive files (tens to hundreds of GB,) you can only run the machine as fast as the disks allow. Simply put, disk I/O rates have not kept pace with the exponential increases in CPU power, especially with multithreaded operations. Ethernet is in basically the same situation; a workstation from 5 years ago could easily saturate gigE in most of these workloads.

Some workloads are indeed I/O-bound, but that is probably rarely the case for this article's target audience. I've never wished I had more I/O during a render (admittedly I'm a hobbyist). CPU? Definitely. I want more RAM sometimes, too, and I'm running 16 GB.

Also, even niche markets can be quite profitable. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that workstations are a dying market. Too small for Apple? Maybe, but then what Apple considers "profitable" is hardly typical for most tech companies.

If you're doing hardware reviews, I think you need to be VERY familiar with the hardware. For me, statements like this cast doubt on the entire process.

This has no bearing on anything I've actually said. If you take issue with a point I've made, spell it out. Insinuating that I don't know what I'm talking about because I haven't used a workstation with a particular logo is pretty lame. I learned Maya on Windows PCs and I have been using workstation-class machines for around 17 years.

This has every bearing. Saying you've no experience with the two of the largest computer equipment manufacturers in the world is suprising. When it comes to HP and Dell equipment: No, you don't know what you're talking about because in your own words "I had no experience with either an HP or a Dell workstation before this." You didn't say "While I have 17 years of PC workstation experience, I've never dealt with HP or Dell." The only other workstation in the article was a Mac. So I'm called lame because I didn't assume you've had other experience? THAT is lame.

There are some gaps in this review that have already been pointed out. It was a decent review, but could have been better had you done more homework. This is my opinion and you may not agree. That's fine with me. It's just that you seem to be personally offended when people point them out.

The only apps that use platform-specific licenses are ZBrush and the Adobe apps.

I wish so badly that Adobe would catch up with the times and stop platform-specific licensing. I can install my copy of Photoshop on two Macs, no problem. But what I really want is to install the same license on one Mac and one PC. <sigh>

Where's the article about the "two PC beasts"? I don't know about HP, but the T5600 is Dell's mid-range workstation, and this one has a low-end CPU, moderate amount of RAM, and single video. Dell's beast would be a T7600 with a pair of fast 6-core CPUs, 256gb RAM, dual Quadro 5000s, and a RAID of SAS drives. Yeah, you're looking at around $17k, but it would definitely qualify as a beast.

PS: I too am a bit disapointed with the new case. The old Dozer cases are serious metal that can handle getting moved around and provide good accessibility. This new case looks like consumer-grade stuff.

The Mac Pro was always a ridiculous thing. An overpriced toy for people who actually call support. I got over that in the 90s. Always faster to figure it out your self especially now that Google knows all. The machines are not especially complicated and resolving hardware issues is nearly always pretty simple. Test till you find the borken bit and replace. Software issues where I live in Linux are always resolvable.

You could always build a stronger machine for substantially less.

You clearly lack the understanding of the world outside your room. Graphics professionals who actually make living using these computers don't build their own machines and they don't have the time to "test till you find the broken bit and replace". They're not hardware junkies who droll over NewEgg fliers.

Sure. That's why there were those "lets show off the guts of my machine" pictures in the article.

Bespoke system builders have existed for pretty much forever. You don't have to get your own hands dirty. All you need is to be aware of what you are buying and to be able to communicate those details to someone else.

I would not be at all surprised to see Apple let the Mac Pro slowly fade into obscurity the way the Xserve did. For 90% of the people who use a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro or iMac with a fast Thunderbolt array will likely serve their needs. For the other 10%, well, sorry; you're not worth Apple's time to chase a shrinking niche market being squeezed from two sides. With the performance pressure from below and price pressure from above, this market probably won't exist in 5 years.

I don't really want to get into this since it's such flame bait but I think that the Apple of Tim Cook is a bit different than the Apple of Steve Jobs (the advertising is worse!). I think Jobs would have had let the creative market die because it was "old" but Tim Cook probably knows that you can't just kill your long-time creative user market without some serious consequences. XServe was a failed venture – killing all hardware for video editors would have a domino effect if companies felt that any piece could disappear once it dropped to less-than-iPhone marketshare. Apple has to make a tower. It's that simple.

I'm not really convinced that Jobs would have killed the big tower (or let it fade into oblivion) if he were still at the helm, I don't have any exhaustive evidence to support my argument other than this old (by internet time) photo showing Jobs using a Power Mac G5 and Cinema display as his main office computer.

I fully agree with you on the network/domino effects that killing the workstations could have.

Where's the article about the "two PC beasts"? I don't know about HP, but the T5600 is Dell's mid-range workstation, and this one has a low-end CPU, moderate amount of RAM, and single video. Dell's beast would be a T7600 with a pair of fast 6-core CPUs, 196gb RAM, dual Quadro 6000s, and a RAID of SAS drives. Yeah, you're looking at around $15k, but it would definitely qualify as a beast.

PS: I too am a bit disapointed with the new case. The old Dozer cases are serious metal that can handle getting moved around and provide good accessibility. This new case looks like consumer-grade stuff.

These are 8-core CPUS, in case you happened to miss that. It's two-thirds of the way up their CPU line, so they're pretty high end. Now, I'll definitely give you the fact that the GPU leaves a bit to be desired and the fact the drives are standard desktop SATA drives is decidedly mid-level. But he did say that many people will have an external Thunderbolt (or eSATA) raid array for fast storage. So there's that. And yeah... 16GB of RAM in a workstation is kinda low. But again, he said he never paged out with that 16GB. Besides, I think it was intended as more of a comparison of machines people would cross-shop with a Mac Pro, not so much as a comparison of the baddest workstations you can find.

Are there any editing suites that are on par with Avid, FCP, or Premiere, that run on Linux?

not really. not since Smoke switched to OS X - that's an editor, compositor and colour grading app in one but it was a very expensive package that was bound to an HP workstation, not off-the-shelf software.

hobgoblin - Cygwin doesn't really expose you to a real Unix machine. Since there are no connections to the GUI, you can't do a lot of modern Unix stuff, like read STDOUT or launch a file from parsed script output. Here's an example that uses both on OS X:

There's nothing preventing you from doing that sort of thing in Cygwin.

You can't trust a Mac to be the same under the covers as an AIX or HP/UX box so the relative advantages of "being Unix" here are limited somewhat for the Mac. The bigger concern with Cygwin would be more along the lines of the fact that it is still an alien environment being overlaid on top of Windows and you might see problems from that.

Maintenance and troubleshooting are beyond the abilities of the average user. Want to install Maya on Fedora? Get your trenchcoat on, because first you’re going to hack your X-Windows conf to blacklist the default nouveau driver, then once you’ve killed the Xserver and installed the Nvidia driver, you need to log in as root to enable dual screen spanning (yes, really).

While Linux is my OS of choice, I'll certainly admit it's not suitable for everyone and less than user friendly at times. And I haven't ever used RHEL and CentOS, but the NVidia binary blob is the same everywhere I reckon. So, once you've installed the driver, did you try running "nvidia-settings"? It should be included with the driver package, or something like "nvidia-utils" depending on your distribution. At least I'm able to use it to switch display configurations on the fly, as a non-root user as well.

What OS are you running? In Ubuntu and RHEL, accessing nvidia-settings requires admin privledges because xorg.conf is located in /etc/xorg and any changes in /etc/ requires root access.

This is what sudo is for. If the GUI launcher doesn't already have nvidia-settings prefixed with sudo or gksudo then you can do so yourself. I think that bit is already done for you in later versions of Ubuntu (as it should have been to begin with).